In the last article on serverless, I referenced the old ad in the New York City subways for a trade school. Their tagline was similar to, "technicians will always be needed, because things always will break." We technologists are familiar - intimately - with fixing broken things. Sometimes, it is our own software, devices or infrastructure; other times, it is someone else's. Either we have become responsible for it, or we need it to work under certain circumstances where it simply fails.

When do you buy? When do you build? This question of "buy vs. build" is at the heart of many a debate in companies, not only inside engineering teams, but between engineering, product management and executives. Fact #1: Engineering is Hard Engineering is very hard. Despite the enormous advances over the years, and the number of system tools and development frameworks and languages, every one of which is touted as a "